Tag: psychology

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a tyrant. This might have something to do with my recently binge-watching The White Queen, a TV show based on the War of the Roses, and particularly sympathising with the notoriously sympathetic King Richard The Third. Continue reading “Of Customer Service”→

Wouldn’t it be a relief, a release, however incredible the situation? You keep desiring to be rid of so many desires, because modern wisdom has convinced you that all want is evil, unless it is painfully got, and can only be justified by further suffering. That you must suffer for your health, for your happiness, because all other easy pleasures lead to more or a different kind of suffering. Ultimately, modern life is a choice between the good kind of suffering, and the bad kind of suffering. And no one knows for sure which is which.Continue reading “Of Appetite”→

First I thought it was a passing phase and out of nowhere, I found myself singing Daniel Powter. Then, a day turned into a few days. On Saturday I called it a “bad week”, as I shed a few embarrassing and uncharacteristic tears in public transport. Today, it’s ten days. Like any bad meteorologist, I hope my prediction is false when I say, “Seems like Hurricane Crapathy will be with us for a fortnight.”

I actually have some experience with this. I played Prince Charming at age ten in the first play I ever did. There were a couple of reasons for this. It was an all-kids endeavour, and there wasn’t a greater theatre enthusiast around. Which meant I adapted The Brothers Grimm’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, directed it, made all the props and had little time to actually act. Also, I happened to be the tallest, which was a general, peer-based fact at the time and not the consequence of having a curious number of short girls in the group. And thus began the first of many forays into imagining the male experience in a made-up world, through many plays in years to come, even if the women who played my love interests kept getting taller than me. So what if I stopped growing and started to look like a woman just two years after being Prince Charming?Continue reading “Of If I Was A Boy”→

I had to buy a present for an upcoming wedding yesterday. I don’t particularly enjoy buying wedding presents for people, because they’re the least imaginative out there. Even when you get a little creative and thoughtful with them, your efforts go unnoticed in a sea of more obvious, less thoughtful presents.

I didn’t go out and seek love….Rumi says we don’t need to hunt for love outside ourselves. All we need to do is to eliminate the barriers inside that keep us away from love. – Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love

We see love broadly as two things – something fickle and frivolous and magnificent and fated when we are younger, and something necessary and domestic and safe and unglamourous when we are a little older. We might fail at achieving either, Continue reading “Of Love and The Imagination”→

I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. Continue reading “Of Fathers”→